Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in
South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security
measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with
policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued
that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in
which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk
leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines
in policing and policy.
While the interpenetration between
urbanism and militarism has often been studied
against the context of the War on
Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this
has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent
crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the
remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical
legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government
used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country’s violent
international image, while promising that security measures would
leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However,
using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies
presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing
measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of
foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security
measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban
marginalization while serving as a training ground
for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper
will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between
militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate
deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.
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